Sean Beavers is an artist who plays with context, juxtaposing his still life subjects in particular, with boxes, paintings of them resting on drawings of similar subjects, or in other backgrounds that accomplish one of the things that art does best — allowing us to see the commonplace with fresh eyes.

Beavers says in his artist’s statement that he thinks of his work as symbolist, in that the subjects of his compositions represent something beyond the objects themselves, and while I don’t claim to have an understanding of the intentions behind his pieces, I do find that element of “more than meets they eye” comes through and adds to the appeal.

I particularly enjoy the series he calls “Stillscape”, in which he paints objects commonly used for still life in the context of shoreline landscapes.

Beavers also paints figurative work and landscapes. The latter tend to be spare and open, often with dramatic cloud formations as their focus.

[Via Jeffrey Hayes]

Adam Hargreaves is an English painter whose focus is on landscape, and in particular, trees.

Though not present in all of his compositions, trees are often the primary subject. Hargreaves finds special fascination in trees with gnarled, twisted trunks, roots covered in moss and wonderful textural elements that give his landscapes a great deal of presence. In a way, it almost feels as if he were doing tree portraits, so individual do some of them seem.

His work appears detailed in small reproduction, but in larger images shows as pleasingly painterly. Though his approach is never overtly impressionistic and his color palette is often muted, there are times when his compositions remind me of some of Van Gogh’s lesser known works, particularly those influenced by Japanese prints.

I personally respond strongly to visual texture in paintings, and in this characteristic, Hargreaves constantly delights. From weathered bark to soft moss to delicate patterns of leaves and branches, he seeks out the most interesting textural aspects of his scene and conveys them with tactile virtuosity.

Adam Hargreaves is the son of Roger Hargreaves, the well-known author and illustrator of the “Mr. Men” series of children’s books. Adam inherited responsibility for the line from his father, and when not painting, continues to write and illustrate books in the series.

Adam Hargreaves is represented by the Fairfax Gallery which has a selection of his work online.

On Hargreaves’ own site, there are two galleries under “Paintings”, for work from 2010, and 2009. Both come up as a slide show, but it can be stopped and thumbnails can be accessed from controls at the bottom. In the 2010 gallery, there is an additional “zoom” control. While not really a zoom feature in the usual sense, it does bring up larger versions of some of the images (as does clicking on the images themselves).

[Via ensuciando las paredes]

Every so often, I like to check back on artists that I’ve written about previously and see if the internet, in its seemingly endless capacity to expand and grow, has graced us with additional image resources for the artist’s work that I didn’t offer in my original post.

In the case of Golden Age illustrator Charles Robinson, who I wrote about in 2007, I’m delighted to say the answer is an emphatic yes.

You might say that illustration was in Charles Robinson’s blood, his father was an illustrator, as were his brothers Thomas Heath Robinson and William Heath Robinson. Elder brother William is the best known of the three, and Charles is sometimes in his shadow, Thomas definitely so.

It’s unfortunate that the work of all three brothers doesn’t receive the attention it deserves.

The good news is that those additional resources I mentioned include several complete books illustrated by Charles, and one with work by all three brothers, now available on the Internet Archive. These, unlike some illustrated books featured on the Archive, have quite good reproductions of the illustrations.

The books feature both color reproductions and a wealth of Robinson’s beautiful ink drawings, reproduced better and in more quantity than I’ve previously seen, and I have to say they have raised my appreciation of Robinson as a pen and ink artist.

Each of the books can be flipped through page by page, or accessed through a page of thumbnails. In addition to the full illustrations, there are numerous spot illustrations and page decorations.

[I found the Internet Archive entries courtesy of this post on The Art of Charles Robinson on "{ feuilleton }", the blog of artist and designer John Coulthart, and I recommend browsing through his Illustrators Archive (Time-Sink Warning).]

Christopher Peterson is an illustrator known in particular for his rock posters. He also does a variety of illustration, storyboards, set designs and exhibit concept designs.

Originally from New York, Peterson studied at the Art Institute of Boston and the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. His clients include Time Magazine, The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Readers Digest, Fortune, McGraw-Hill, Watson-Guptill, Macy’s, Courvoisier, Warner Brothers, Joe Boxer and Bill Graham Presents, among others; and his rock posters have included such performers as Paul McCartney, Phish, The String Cheese Incident, Sting, Eric Clapton, Elvis Costello, John Hiatt, Taj Mahal and Gloria Estefan.

Peterson’s approach varies from relatively highly rendered, to painterly to loose and sketchlike. His website features sections for posters, illustration, concept renderings and sketches, and you can find an additional portfolio of his work on the Shannon Associates artists’ representative site.

I particularly enjoy the fun conceptual devices he employs in his rock posters, with band names and concert information arrayed on grain elevators, buildings, room interiors, train cars and the like.

19th century painter Thomas Hovenden was noted both for his work as an artist and for his role as a teacher at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

As a painter, Hovenden painted domestic scenes, historical events and to some extent still life subjects. He is noted in particular for his depictions of African Americans, both in domestic and historic contexts, such as his well known depiction of The Last Moments of John Brown (images above, top), now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has a zoomable high resolution version on the website.

Hovenden’s interest in African American subjects may have stemmed from his wife, artist Helen Corson, who he met while studying at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris. Her family were abolitionists, and the barn on their property that hosted anti-slavery meetings, and as a stop on the underground railroad, later served as Hovenden’s studio.

In 1886 Hovenden was appointed to replace Thomas Eakins as Professor of Painting and Drawing at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts when Eakins was asked to leave amid conflicts with the board of directors over nude models, insubordination and other accusations of “inappropriate behavior”.

Hovenden’s students included such noted artists as Alexander Stirling Calder, Robert Henri and Henry Ossawa Tanner.

Based in Madrid, Spain, Felideus (pen name for Juan Parra) has worked as an art director, animator, screenwriter and graphic designer for film and video productions, and is now a freelance illustrator, designer and writer.

As a writer and illustrator, Felideus has worked on book projects and in comic books.

He works both in traditional media like watercolor, acrylic, pencil and ink, and in digital media, using applications like Photoshop and Painter.

Felideus maintains a blog which also functions as his website, though the Portfolio section is labeled as Under Construction, and points to his portfolios on CG Society, deviantART, CG Gallery CGHub and Behance.

These appear somewhat redundant. I found the ones on CG Society or CG Hub as complete as any.

His blog, however, provides discussion of the work, names the projects for which the illustrations were intended, and provides additional images, including detail crops and in some cases, step-through process in the form of animated GIFs. The most recent blog entries feature translations of the text in four languages.

Felideus’ highly rendered, richly detailed style feels fresh and resists any feeling of being overworked, partly because of his superb use of value and color, and partly in his use of texture, contrasting highly detailed passages with areas that are almost flat. I particularly like the way he uses a limited palette and deft control of value, to push layers of an image back and dramatically bring others forward.

His more recent images, some of which are part of an advertising campaign for Buskers beer, and a few of which are for an in progress book project called “The Automatic Forest” (images above, bottom two) carry echoes of some of the Golden Age illustrators who worked in detailed and highly textural styles, like Arthur Rackham and Gustav Tenggren. Felideus manages at the same time to make his images feel ancient and modern, and uses his digital tools to great advantage.

Self taught New York artist Janet Ternoff finds great fascination in the facades and interiors of buildings.

She works in a realistic style, at times with considerable detail. She works in a range of sizes, from 8×10 to considerably larger.

Her series of exteriors of bars, stores and restaurants feel in a way as if portraits of the establishments, with lots of attention to details of signs and other characteristics of the facades.

She also has a series of surface and subway trains as wall as a series of interiors that I particularly enjoy, particularly when they feature staircases in older buildings.

In all of her compositions, Ternoff is continually finding fascinating play of light, from brief splashes of highlights against weathered brick to deep contrasts of shadow and sunlight. She also paints scenes of twilight and nighttime, as well scenes with stormy or overcast skies.

Her website has a gallery divided into subsections, one of which, “New collection” is divided again into further subsections.

Ternoff also maintains a blog called New York Street Art.

Carel Fabritius was a Dutch painter whose adopted name comes from the latin for carpenter, or if more broadly used, craftsman.

Fabritius studied in the the studio of Rembrandt, and is generally considered to be Rembrandt’s most talented pupil, and the only one to really break free of the master’s influence and develop his own style. This is notable in particular in the contrast of his color and texture filled portrait backgrounds with Rembrandt’s deep pools of darkness. His use of cool color harmonies is also distinctly different from the color choices of his master.

On leaving Rembrandt’s studio, he established himself for a time as an independent artist in his hometown of Beemster, and then moved to Delft, and is generally thought of as a Delft painter.

Fabritius was one of the most influential Dutch painters of his time, despite the fact that his career, and life, were tragically cut short in the “Delft Thunderclap“, an event in 1654 in which the Delft armory, and its large store of gunpowder, exploded, devastating a large part of the town.

It is presumed that much of Fabritius’ work was also lost in the explosion, as only about 12-15 of his paintings (depending on questions of attribution) are known to remain. Among those, however, is considerable variety, and Fabritius is also credited as one of starting points of trompe l’oeil painting.

I had the pleasure of seeing The Goldfinch (images above, top two; zoomable version here) in a Vermeer show in New York some years ago that included work by some of Vermeer’s contemporaries. It was the only non-Vermeer painting in the show to which I repeatedly returned. From a few feet away it is effectively trompe l’oeil illusionistic, close up, it’s a marvel of painterly loaded-brush painting.

Fabritius is generally acknowledged to have been an influence on Vermeer as well as De Hooch, who were also working in Delft at that time; though he was likely not, as you will sometimes see suggested, Vermeer’s teacher.

Like Vermeer, Fabritius is presumed to have made use of the camera obscura, and was fascinated with optical effects and linear perspective. Only one of his perspective experiments survives, but it’s a fascinating painting,

View of Delft (images above, bottom three; larger version here) has a fascinating curved perspective and oddly positioned and cut-off rendering of the violin in the left foreground. Taking clues from similar works by other artists, it was probably meant to be displayed on a curved surface inside a “peep-box“. These, viewed through a peephole, provide only one fixed-point view of the painting, giving the artist more control over what the viewer sees, and would have provided a realistic illusion of space and sense of place that must have been mesmerizing.

The painting, along with one of Fabritius’s presumed self-portraits, is in the collection of the National Gallery , London, which provides a wonderful full-screen and zoomable high resolution view of the painting (use controls at right of the image).